Hardy Publishes a Poem and the Poets Disagree; Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Have a Talk; Henry Williamson’s Headmaster is With Him in Spirit

Men Who March Away

(Song of the Soldiers)

What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away?

Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye
Who watch us stepping by,
With doubt and dolorous sigh?
Can much pondering so hoodwink you!
Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye?

Nay. We see well what we are doing,
Though some may not see –
Dalliers as they be –
England’s need are we;
Her distress would leave us rueing:
Nay. We well see what we are doing,
Though some may not see!

In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.

Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
Leaving all that here can win us;
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away.

This is Thomas Hardy’s first big war poem, written four days ago at least in part in response to Masterman’s summons of one week ago. It was published today in The Times, and immediately became a major part of the war’s poetic soundtrack.

What to make of it? Well, it is ostentatiously humble: a mere marching song, a simple appeal to the most basic of emotions. It’s catchy enough, and, especially when compared with Newbolt or Kipling, admirably restrained. It’s not Hardy’s fault that “bite the dust” has worn oddly, or that “victory crowns the just” is perhaps not so often a majority sentiment in our times.

But it is his sentiment none the less, and it doesn’t fit at all, not one little bit, with the fatalist and ironic tone of the bulk of his poetry. But why take my word for it? We have, in Charles Hamilton Sorley, a gifted young critic who will soon earn the personal authority to criticize sloppy pro-war sentiments. (Sorley, home and writing few dated letters, has been on hiatus, here–but we will hear more from him soon.)

To Sorley, this is an “arid poem, ”

untrue of the sentiments of the ranksman going to war: “Victory crowns the just” is the worst line he ever wrote–filched from a leading article in The Morning Post, and unworthy of him who had always previously disdained to insult Justice by offering it a material crown like Victory.^[1]

Harsh–but perhaps true? Paul Fussell damns the poem at the start of his great book with his most dismissive adjective: it is “unironic.”^[2] And yet, the other poet I have hitherto extolled as an unfailingly sensitive reader–Edward Thomas–“surprisingly, liked the poem.”^[3]

I thought Hardy’s poem in The Times

Ere the barn-cocks say/Night is growing gray,

the only good one concerned with the war.

A quandary. Thomas picks out his sort of thing–the rural night, the homely animals–while Sorley focuses on the problems in his own bailiwick: Hardy’s paltry philosophy and negligent logic. Thomas, too, is speaking early in the war, and damning with faint praise.

If we were to try to decide the matter, well, there’s not much to go on in the poem itself. One thing we might read closely is, of course, the observer figure, the “friend with the musing eye.” It’s easy to treat him as Hardy himself, inserted into his own little marching song to look askance at its simplistic argument and jaunty meter.

Perhaps: in any case, the observer can hardly be faulted for sighing sadly at the sight of men marching away, for doubting that all is well with the assumptions and the intentions of the new soldiers. But the observer hardly carries the day: it’s either a weak hedge against the dominant sentiment of unthinking faith or it’s a cop-out, a few poison-penned lines that neither redeem the poem nor weaken it is a recruiting tool. I’m with Sorley.

From a great poet’s unfinest hour to a popular novelist’s darkest night of the literary soul.

Two days ago we witnessed the odious, profiteering, churlish, lower-middle-class bad form of Peter Jackson’s brother-in-law shock our semi-fictional cigar merchant into an outburst. Hitherto he had considered his responsibilities to his business too important to be discounted. He was innocent of soldiering and so had no fear of it: “on the contrary… it seemed to him the obvious, glorious, and easy solution of his problem” while dropping everything to enlist would show “a lack of moral courage, a yielding to popular clamour.” Sounds a bit self-serving, but then again, we have a growing body of evidence that it tends to be the schoolboys and recent-ex-schoolboys who pine away for a commission. It is a bit more complex for married men with financial responsibilities.

But this is fast-paced fiction, so:

Two nights later [i.e. today, a century back]–at the very moment when the Beasts in Gray, muttering “Grosse Malheur” as they shuffled through darkling towns, were reeling back to the Aisne before the armies of France and a handful of Englishmen–Peter Jackson and his wife sat over their coffee in the drawing-room at Lowndes Square…

“Pat,” he began, “I don’t think I can keep out of this thing any longer. It wouldn’t be”–he fumbled for the expression–“quite playing the game. but if I go, there are risks…”

Jackson, about as gifted an uxorial interlocutor as one would expect–if one based one’s assessment of the English business classes entirely on John Cleese characters–chatters on for a bit about how the insurance is all in order if he should fall in the fray, but that the firm, in dire straights already, will likely fail if he abandons it. The dialogue is painfully mannered, but it may be at that is–at least in part–intended to be so. Patricia Jackson’s internal monologue, however, is meant to be taken straight, and it’s pretty tough to read.

‘Oh, what do you care about losses?’–her heart cried out in her. ‘He’s going. He’s a man. What else matters?’

The ensuing paragraphs are too awful to quote at length. Realizing that her man has made a cool decision to to make “a great sacrifice,” Patricia at once melts from mere “pal” into “at a word his mate, his woman to do with as he would.” She feels herself becoming a real woman, and lies awake sighing at the depths of her new love. Stay tuned for a dissertation on “The English Male Novelist and the Erotic Imaginary of Condescending Gentlemanly Explications of Their Decision-Making.”

I’m going to complain, as this project goes on, about the general failure of soldier-novelists to write plausible female thoughts–but it’s nice to have this truly abysmal failure in the background, that we might better appreciate the earnest, sporting, second-rate failures.^[4]

Charles Carrington, having volunteered three days previously, joined a long queue in Birmingham today to be

‘attested’, medically examined, sworn in, handed the King’s symbolical shilling, and… dismissed to wait the calling-up order. Again nothing happened for four weeks and while the Battle of the Marne was fought and won I was riding around Warwickshire on my bicycle. But I was a soldier, drawing pay at the rate of one shilling, with subsistence allowance at he rate of two and ninepence per day. Twenty-seven and sixpence a week was a good wage for a working man in those days.^[5]

Carrington, however, was not a working man, but middle-class and well-educated, with a pedigree close enough to that of the typical subaltern to make his enlistment in the ranks proof of real enthusiasm and a lack of pretension–some of his formative years were spent, after all, in New Zealand.

Henry Williamson probably received today^[6] two letters from masters at his old school, Colfe Grammar School. Both were dated the 7th: he had evidently been sending milder versions of his complaint/brag letters to destinations other than home during last week’s YMCA writing tent frenzy. Colfe’s was an old school, but it was not as prestigious as the real Public Schools. It aspired. The headmaster’s letter is worth quoting at length:

My dear Williamson,

Many thanks for your most interesting letter. The hardships will not be without their use & when you get fit,–why, glorious. I speak having suffered in many a weary walk…

Yes, the old master likens his strolls to military training marches–then again, Henry was probably asking for it with his paeans to his own mahogany fortitude.

Very many old Colfeians have taken the post of honour. We hope to make a roll of all such for undying memory, Never was there a more righteous war–civilization against despotism. None of us can survive with honour unless there is victory.

It is quite probable the war may be short. What sort of soldiers are made by scouring & spitting in the face. There can be no ideals. And we must hope & trust though all the strings of our lyre be broken….

In fairness, neither have Henry and the other Territorials learned to respect German soldiers and loathe the bravado of old men now asleep in England. But, histrionic as Williamson’s letters have been, there is no excuse for a man of (presumably) mature years indulging in the following sort of “I’ll be there in spirit” sentiment. Horseshit:

…when you lie in the field amid all the panoply of war, seeking memories of the past ere sleep falls upon you, think that my thoughts will be with you nightly in my solitary walk between 10 & 11 p.m. with regrets that I cannot be with you to share your fighting & hardships.

Kindest wishes. Very truly yours, F.W. Lucas.^[7]

Well, Master Lucas has done very well to force me to a positive revision of my opinion of Hardy’s watcher-of-the-troops. The figure in the poem may ponder ineffectively and get shouted down by the marching men, but at least he ponders. He’s no great victory for poetry over jingoism, but he reminds us, even from the wayside of such a weak poem, why Hardy will be beloved of the trench poets when so many old writing fellows are despised. As for Lucas, it’s frightening that a teacher, even one writing to buck up a young man in the army, can string together casual stereotypes of German militarism, bullshit classical references, total assurance of righteousness, and the unquestioned assumption that, strolling along of a London evening, he can “share” the lot of the soldier. No wonder so many soldiers will feel that they have to take the burden of writing the war upon themselves, to question their faith and redirect their fire.